Travel Support for Early Career Researchers to the 2025 Glacial Isostatic Adjustment Workshop

This award will support travel for US participants, mainly early career researchers, to attend an international conference on Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA) to be held in June 2025 in Sydney, British Columbia, Canada. GIA refers to the long-lasting response of the solid Earth to past and present glacial mass changes. The effects of GIA contribute to observations that are used to measure important present-day processes, such as ice and water mass changes and sea level change.

As a result, it is critical to understand and develop accurate models for GIA. Changes in ice and water mass offer a chance to probe the mechanical properties of Earth’s interior and explain much of the history of sea level change prior to the modern era. The conference will provide an opportunity for US-based scientists to interact with colleagues from around the world in a close and focused environment, share their research findings, be exposed to new ideas, and meet new contacts and potential collaborators.

Studies of Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA) relate models of past and present glacier and ice sheet changes, models for the rheological structure of the Earth, and observations of present-day deformation, past and present relative sea level changes, and past and present shoreline tilts. Today’s studies need to integrate the Earth’s response to surface load variations over a variety of timescales, from the elastic response to the viscoelastic response over decades to centuries to millennia and consider realistic 3D Earth rheology models in addition to 1D models.

Results from these studies are needed by scientists as different as climate scientists trying to reconcile the response of the cryosphere and sea level to climate change to solid earth scientists trying to understand postseismic deformation after earthquakes. GIA is now recognized as a potential limiting error source for a wide variety of other geophysical studies, involving present-day mass changes (glaciers, ice sheets, and hydrology), relative sea level, tectonic plate motions, and even the underlying geodetic reference frame itself.

Attending a focused meeting on the topic of GIA has much more impact than simply attending a session in a general conference, because many of the future advances that are needed require bringing together knowledge across disparate fields. This involves, for example, bringing modelers and observational scientists together, or bringing together those with knowledge of ice mass history with those with knowledge of mantle rheology.

Early-career scientists supported by this grant will have the opportunity to present their work to a set of global experts in their field and related fields and identify new or potential international (and US-based) collaborators. This award was co-funded by the ANT – Earth Sciences program in the Office of Polar Programs.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.